Towards Secure Cooperation in Online Social Networks

The rapid growth of online social networks (OSNs) has brought a revolutionary change in the way geographically dispersed people interact and cooperate with each other towards achieving some common goals. Recently, some new ways of ad-hoc cooperation have been demonstrated during the hurricane Irene and the earthquake in Japan. In such emergency situations, OSNs have already taken a significant role as alternative social media that support altruistic information sharing and cooperation among people. However, existing cooperation approaches have not been well-organized and are highly vulnerable to security threats such as a disclosure of users’ identities and the leakage of other private data due to the lack of secure cooperation mechanisms. To support secure and effective cooperation in OSNs, in this paper, we propose the Social CRiBAC (Community-centric Role interaction Based Access Control) model, which extends the existing CRiBAC model [1] for use in OSNs to support cooperation among users. To verify the feasibility of the proposed model, we have implemented a prototype application on Facebook and demonstrate its applicability with two working examples.